The New Kid: A Percy Jackson Fanfic
by TwoDramaNerdsInABoat
Summary: Two girls decide to google their odd new classmate, and are surprised by what comes up. Just a short little humor piece.


My friend Hannah came to ambush me right before third period, bombarding me with questions about some new kid at school. The conversation is as follows.

"You've heard about the new kid?"

"No."

"How is that possible? Everyone's talking about him!"

"Well, obviously not everyone, if I don't know who he is."

"I'm telling you, this kid was worth knowing about. He was weird."

"Weird how?"

"He's our age, right? But he has a fading streak of gray in his hair."

I sigh, exasperated. "Hannah, that's not uncommon. Loads of people get grays when they're our age, and just dye over it. This kid might just not have the money for a dye job."

"You didn't let me finish. That's not the end." Hannah plops down her books at the desk next to mine just as the teacher starts the lesson. "He had a tattoo, an odd one. The letters said SPQR, and beneath them, just a bunch of lines."

"Lines?"

"Lines."

"How many?"

"I dunno, I didn't count them! And he was wearing a necklace. It had all of these beads on it. They looked like cheap wooden craft beads, but they had these really intricate images painted on to them. There was one with a picture of a trident, like from the Little Mermaid.

I pull out my phone.

"You aren't supposed to have that in class!" Hannah hisses.

I begin to type in my password. "And _you_ weren't supposed to cheat on our chemistry test, but here we are anyway."

My home screen pops up and I go to Safari. I don't have a hotspot, so it's a good thing I'm already logged on to the school's wifi from this morning. Students aren't supposed to use the school wifi for our phones. In my opinion, the teachers shouldn't have made the password '12345679.'

"What are you doing?" Hannah asks.

"Googling this kid." I reply. Now that Hannah's got me interested, I refuse to stop. "What did you say his name was?"

"Percy Jackson."

"Great." I go to the magical world of the Internet and quickly search his name. "No one escapes the Internet," I mutter to myself, "not even mysterious teens."

Sure enough, hundreds of search results popped up. I mentally prepared myself to have to search through thousands of different Percy Jacksons to find the right one, but the first article I click on was about him.

"Huh," I grunt. I scroll down with my thumb. There's a blown-up picture of what looks like a much younger Percy Jackson and two other kids, standing outside of a diner staring down a biker guy. It was poor quality- one of those cheap cell-phone shots that always ends up on the news. "What did you do, Percy?" I ask myself. Hannah scoots her chair closer to mine and leans over my shoulder as much as she can without the teacher getting really suspicious. The article's title is something like, TWELVE YEAR OLD DELINQUENT GOES CROSS-COUNTRY, PERCY JACKSON SPOTTED. MAN POSSIBLE TERRORIST? The article goes on to explain how little twelve-year-old Percy ran away from home with two other random kids and went on a cross-country trip.

"Oh my god," I say to Hannah. "The kid ran away from home at twelve, and managed to get to California."

We went to the next article.

This one was also about Percy Jackson- the same Percy Jackson. It showed a much better quality photo of him and holding a gun, facing the biker again, standing on a beach. The title of this one was PERCY JACKSON CHALLENGES AND ESCAPES ALLEGED KIDNAPPER. CHILDREN RETURN HOME SAFELY. I read this one.

"Hannah, turns out they thought he ran away but really the kid was kidnapped by a biker-dude and shot him on the beach."

I hand her the phone when the teacher turns his back to write on the board. Soon, Hannah hands it back.

"Why does it say they used guns? The picture shows them fighting with swords."

I look back at the image, but I only see the guns.

I shrug. "You must be seeing things, Hannah."

As our teacher continues to drone about math, I scroll through the news stories about Percy Jackson. They're all about him. And not just the ones from mainstream news sites like NBC, CNN, and FOX. There are articles from all kinds of conspiracy sites, too. I try to stay on the mainstream ones. I've had enough research classes to know what to click on. I spend the entire class reading about this Percy Jackson. When the bell rings, I run over to report to Hannah.

"Hannah, I hate to say it, but I think you're right. This kid you told me about? He's weird. And the normal new-kid weird. Weird. He's been being kicked out of schools since first grade, for all sorts of reasons. Even in Kindergarten, he reported to the teachers that he was bothered on the playground by some guy with one eye. As in, one single eye in the middle of his forehead."

She nods. "I had a study hall, and I found this online site. At first, it looked like the usual conspiracy theory thing, you know, those people who make the shitty connections to the Illuminati and then put it on YouTube? But then I started reading, and it's entirely about him. And not just him- others, like him. Those other two kids from the first article we found, their names are Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood. Annabeth Chase- she's a runaway. She left home at a really young age, like, seven or something. There are all these grainy shots of her fighting with this dagger, entirely dressed in greek armor. And the Grover guy? He basically spent ten years in Middle School."

"Some people just flunk."

"This kid didn't flunk out. He just didn't age. The guy who runs this website found a bunch of Grover's old school photos from yearbooks. He hasn't aged. He should be in his thirties or something. But he still looks only fifteen. And there are even more. Like, Percy Jackson went missing. And he ended up in California. Then he, Annabeth, and these other five kids flew across the world in a _giant boat_."

I look over her shoulder at the website. There's a bunch of grainy cell phone pictures that were probably take over a long distance, but I don't see what Hannah's talking about when she means there's a giant boat.

"Hannah, there's nothing there."

"That's another thing," Hannah explains. "I think only certain people can see the weird things. Like, I don't know, maybe Percy Jackson can use some kind of advanced tech to make it so that we don't see the bizarre stuff around him."

"Then how can you see through it?" I ask.

The bell rings. Hannah turns back to me.

"We meet here at the end of school, okay?"

I nod. Then I go to class, and I am greeted by none other than Percy Jackson.

He doesn't look like much. Probably the kind of kid who gets Cs in school, a sort of class-clown. A little shifty. Not someone you would trust with your wallet. I look for the tattoo on his arm that Hannah had mentioned before. It _is_ pretty strange. Seems to disappear if you don't look at it straight on. And for some reason, Percy Jackson is holding on to a pen as if his life depends on it.

I take a deep breath.

I suppose I ought to introduce myself to Percy Jackson.

 _Thanks for reading! This story was inspired by a Tumblr post about what would happen if some kid at Percy's school googles him. the character Hannah in the_ _story is supposed to be one of the mortals that can see through the mist- henceforth_ _being able to see the demigods's swords, the Argo II, and any other magical item that the Mist should have concealed from her. Sorry if there were any minor or major spelling/grammatical errors. We hope you enjoyed reading this PJO fic!_


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